Top Five Analytics to Review Every Day

16May

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This post is written by Sara Arnold, Web Communications Manager at OmniUpdate.

Google Analytics offers web teams a wealth of information, so much that it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin. Even experienced analytics users get lost in the data, treading down paths that look interesting, but don’t provide a lot of direction.

That said, it’s a good idea to check your analytics regularly, even daily. Establishing a routine will help you get familiar with the system, spot anomalies, identify trends as they start to develop, and determine what you want to learn from your data.

Here are five analytics measures to review on a daily basis:

Audience Overview

Whenever you check in, take a spin by the “Audience Overview.” Data on sessions, users, page views, and so forth offer the most value over the long haul, as they reveal traffic patterns. But reviewing them daily gives you a sense of typical site usage and uncovers atypical events as they happen.

See an odd spike in overall visits? Check referring sources—your school might have been referenced in a news story or a social post might have gone viral. Whatever the case, you’ll probably want to know what’s happening so you reap the benefits or anticipate any fallout.

Anomalies like this are easier to spot on small sites, where even modest traffic bumps make an observable impact. If you manage a large site, create a Google Analytics view for off-campus traffic only—you’ll find that patterns become more interesting once you separate out internal users.

Acquisition Question

Along similar lines, check the “Acquisition Overview” for a quick look at where visitors are coming from. This is especially useful if you’ve recently launched a paid search, display ad, or email campaign—an uptick in those channels will tell you they’re working.

You might need to dig a little deeper to find other items of interest. For example, click “Referral” to find other sites sending you traffic, “Email” to see which landing pages recipients are visiting, or “Paid Search” to review which of your paid keywords are generating clicks.

A campaign works like this: You create a special URL for a page you want to promote, then include that URL in a social media post, email, ad, and the like. From there, use Google Analytics to see exactly how many clicks came from that specific source.

Google offers a tool for creating campaign URLs. It adds various campaign parameters to a page’s standard URL, giving Google Analytics the info it needs to report traffic sources. (Note that some tools, like Google AdWords, automatically ad tracking parameters.)

Campaign data appears under “Acquisition” in Google Analytics. Check there to see whether your campaigns are drawing users to your site.

Goal Completions

Google Analytics goals tell you how many users are completing specific actions—requesting information, for example, or watching a video. Like campaigns, they need to be set up in advance with a purpose in mind.

Campaigns track where users come from, whereas goals track what they do. You might create a destination goal that registers every time a user sees a “thank you” page after submitting a form. Or you might set up an event goal that tracks every click to a specific button, drop-down menu, or play button.

Goal data appears under “Conversions” in Google Analytics.

Events

Use Google Analytics events to track all kinds of interactions with your site. Sometimes, you’ll use these events to establish goals, as described above. Other times, you’ll monitor them just to see how users are engaging with your content.

For example, many college and university home pages feature “hero” images that highlight news, events, and other content. Event tracking lets you see how often these images get clicked. Prominent menu links, calls to action, and video play buttons are other good spots to deploy event tracking.

Daily, you might use event tracking to determine whether swapping out featured content boosts engagement, or to see whether visitors are watching your new video. It’s another way to assess the results of your work—you’ll find event data under “Behavior.”